nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
A siren is a mythological coastal bird/woman who, like the mermaid, is known to seafaring folk for her beguiling beauty and mesmerizing call. Her song is an exquisite beacon and a spellbinding lure. Siren is conceived as Welcome –a collective sonic embrace celebrating our return to, and delivery from, common waters. Siren honors the urgent will to survival through tenacious journeys into unknown futures while invoking ambivalent emotions associated with grand passages and existential transitions.
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
planet species animal human water free. Agent. in motion on the move in flight of the Earth of the Land of the Ocean her ecology. here and there sea and ice wind and current seed and settlement. birthing stretching growing learning lamenting fearing conquering breaking bruising rejoicing rounding looping surviving dying becoming born and dying anew a willful urge an urgent call to return a traumatic flight an existential passage an Oceanic Fantasy. breathe breathe breathe. compete create destroy win release rush. rush of anticipation. rush of adventure. bully dominate maim kill rush. greed to pillage. rush to sex. defile the bloodline. crush. settle colonize give it a name call it Power. a Nation State. reorganize order categorize Institutionalize Rule of Law Religion and State. spread the Language. spread the Lie. Authority syntax CAPITAL Letters the Printing Press to the Internet. educate assimilate annihilate exploit and syphon up. exercise brutality. divide and conquer. caste and creed colour and other. clear the land. corral the people camps and cages prison and zoos guns and cameras walls and fences borders and zones. evidence documents and predatory bureaucracy keep some in and others out. in flight the Siren calls. She is playful. She is Welcome. refuge beckons hope is horizon. She is lunar tide and current. She is elemental. She is the sun. She is the storm. wind against the sea ice desert sands fields of wheat solid rock. She is refusal. She is fleeting accelerating heartbeat raising hairs disembodied Witness universal Ancestor broken from tribe tribalized anew you and me over millennia peopling the planet. Diaspora.
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
Siren sounds punctuate the urban cityscape. The familiar yet mysterious trills and tremolos of the Common loon resonate from my Ontario childhood. Ululations are improvised vocal expressions common to feminine cultures of the global south. The sounds are performed individually and collectively as a kind of vocal applause. Ululations celebrate arrival and clear paths forward. Ululating produces a primal physical and emotional release –clears the sinuses, lacrimal glands, the skin. The ululation trill is diverse to geography and reflects political ideologies that govern women’s relative freedom to express and emote. Siren harmonics arise from sonic diversity among geo-specific vocalizations in polyphonic play.
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
Reflections on SIREN \ Karen Alexander
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
SIREN is a solo exhibition by the Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist nichola feldman-kiss. At the core of SIREN is reflection on concepts of diaspora, migration and displacement, the paradox of national boundaries and borders within an ecology of elemental flows. A new large-scale immersive installation of digital photography, specially commissioned by the Koffler Gallery for SIREN, sits alongside contextual artworks, which together dynamically engage stories of traumatic ocean crossings and the geopolitics of the climate emergency intertwined with colonial narratives and diasporic themes of movement and migration. Siren lll is sculptural in form. A ceiling-mounted grid of LED video panels is suspended askew toward two plantation teak steamer chairs framed by a plastic turf rug. The artwork is a meditation on boundaries and borders between the past and the present –abstracted aquatic depictions, and digital animations are set against an arresting ambisonic soundscape of disembodied voices. Siren III weaves a haunting elliptical narrative of panic, submersion, and seemingly last-minute survival.
From this transatlantic viewpoint, feldman-kiss's artworks couldn't be more timely, as English news bulletins and national newspapers are saturated with alarmist articles regarding the number of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats from Europe. The exhibition's title plays on the double meaning of 'siren' as both the penetrating sound of emergency vehicles that punctuate the urban cityscape and the more mythical associations to hybrid female creatures said to have lured sailors to their doom. feldman-kiss designed their soundscape as a feminine counterbalance to the seduction of the open water and the distant horizon, so often considered masculine spaces of war and adventure. SIREN's overall sound results from a close collaboration with eight local women who perform the artist's international chorus —together, they create a delicate balance between alarm and comfort. feldman-kiss began working with improvised ululation in 2018 with two shoreline performances on a remote pier of Toronto Island. Through a hypnotic mix of traditional and experimental sounds, their vocal 'experiments' in the public realm inspired the choral element of Siren III's complex score. Ululation, or zagareet, is an unwritten vocal tradition practised by women across diverse cultures from Africa through the Levant. The high-pitched vocalisations are made by rapidly
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
beating the back of the tongue against the uvula. Ululations are a kind of vocal applause
intended to Welcome and clear paths forward. They express strong feelings and intense emotions.
and clear paths forward. They express strong feelings and
intense emotions. Through feldman-kiss's listening, the
voices do more; they represent female empowerment
imbued with the spirit of survival and rebirth. These
polycultural sounds refer to broader associations related
to non-western traditions of story-telling and oral forms
of expression. For feldman-kiss, the disembodied chorus
acts as a witness and guide. Along with the artist, the
performers' diverse backgrounds bring a sense of the
personal to the artwork as they embody a tangible lived
experience of migration and transition, which echoes
throughout the work.
surfacings sets the scene, and the tone of the exhibition,
feldman-kiss reorganised video frames grabbed from
Siren lll ocean footage into a grid of twenty-five ambiguous
aquatic windows. Taken together, the grid of digital
video stills offers a sense of anticipation and foreboding,
suggesting both exit from and entry to another worldly
pool of memories. With their depiction of surface tension,
the artwork explores boundaries and borders, a common
theme throughout the works in SIREN. Impressionistic
views of the sun, sea, and light filtered through the
Ocean's surface establish SIREN's unsettling sense of
bodily dislocation, fractured narratives and images –the
blue of the sky seeming to mirror the blue of the sea.
Are we above or are we below the surface of the
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
water? With no figure ever depicted, we always try to orient our
perspective to the works encountered. Sourced from a
few seconds of raw material, the screen grabs of surfacings
become liminal spaces for transformation and collective
remembering.
Instinctively drawn to Newfoundland's North Atlantic
coast as a place of meditation and communion, the
development of SIREN began during a period of a personal
need for feldman-kiss to recover and heal. "I had become
broken-hearted for me and for the world. I suffered a moral
injury. I needed to self-repair". Keen to produce more
life-affirming work in the wake of a long experience as a
defendant in predaceous litigation. Late 2017, feldman-kiss discovered the Sea-Watch online post that would
take their work in an unexpected direction. The hour-long video depicts one of the humanitarian organisation's
most harrowing Mediterranean Sea rescue missions.
Vulnerable rubber raft-bound passengers, desperate to
find sanctuary, are pitted against the might of the sea and
the calculated actions of Libyan coast guards working to
defend the shores of Europe from intruders. The viewer
is placed in the centre of the action. While many people
are saved by the Sea-Watch rescuers, we also witness on-camera drownings. The Sea-Watch video shows events
unfolding in real-time without commentary. All we hear
is the direct sound from lifeguards and victims.
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
On viewing the Sea-Watch video, feldman-kiss made connections to local and international ideas of diaspora with the traumas of contemporary people in migration. The artist's quest was not to dwell on the horrifying and morbid subject matter but to discover a shared sense of optimism and recovery by counterbalancing the brutality of the sea with the healing power of collective feminine voices. The artist has characterised their development of the SIREN artworks as "an investigation of a lifelong mermaid call, an unquenchable tidal-pull of return to the complex planetary geo-cultural corridor that is the Atlantic Ocean". In the development of SIREN, feldman-kiss saught to move away from the optics of symbolic figurative representations to explore a more abstract presence coupled with their ongoing interest in the highly politicised subject matter. From their initial encounter with the Sea-Watch video, feldman-kiss engaged with the (near) drowner's viewpoint, a decision considerably reinforced by their own love of the water and of deep-sea diving. In a multi-layered localised reimaging of the rescue mission, feldman-kiss adopts a first-person perspective in Siren III. The imposing immersive installation explores varying states of physical and psychological consciousness and disorientation triggered by drowning, not to reproduce the trauma heartlessly, but to consider a different narrative. The discombobulating experience of entering the water is over instantly, leaving viewers with a rush of excitement or gripped with fear. The chaotic sounds of the rescue mission above the surface disappear, giving way to the sensory connection of bodily heartbeats. Once underwater, 'the drowner' experiences
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
moments of clarity, mystery and wonder as they explore an
unknown world, encountering strange creatures and the
ominous presence of a shifting iceberg. The arresting and, at
times, soothing sounds of polyphonic ululations become a sonic
guide through an underwater dreamscape.
Set in the waters off the coast of Newfoundland, and having
developed Siren lll in close collaboration with the local dive
shop operator, early pandemic restrictions shifted Siren lll from
a highly interpersonal onsite production into a remote shoot,
with feldman-kiss directing at distance from her downtown
Toronto studio. The eleven-minute abstracted drama is ominous
and mesmerising in equal measure as we sink in surrender to
the murky water as we are carried to an uncertain destination,
and eventual escape. Filmed from the viewpoint of the engulfed
protagonist, the moment of entry into the water is fleeting
before descending into a teal-blue abyss. Guided by the
soundtrack, the viewer encounters a barely discernible seascape
of fractured images, some real, some constructed. An iceberg
drifts by, blocking our view of the sunny sky beyond the surface,
creating a real sense of entrapment. Keen to work with the local
crew's intimate experience with the ice flow and working from
a position of sensuality, feldman-kiss rendered the movement of
the ice majestic and hypnotic. The iceberg plays a central role
in the underwater narrative of submersion and escape. SIREN
is an Oceanic fantasy and return to the water from whence we
all came and the experience of a back-to-the-womb embrace
before a spiritual rebirth.
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
As we experience the aquatic shifts and changes below the surface, escape is by no means certain. The
ever-present disembodied voices offer a delicate balance between alarm, regeneration, and healing.
It is only when the ululations rise collectively from the depths –forcing the sinking perspective
from those depths into a whirlwind escape, that survival is certain. Harmonic ululations situate the
feminine voice centrally. The highly sculpted soundscape combines a symphonic manipulation of
the female voice to mobilise ideas of the uncanny, as varying levels of accentuated audio provoke
an unsettling bodily awareness in the viewer. The deliberate positioning of the hanging subwoofer
speakers optimises the transmission of physical and environmental sounds, offering us the feeling
of aquatic suspension. An even more complex sound mix is presented via headphones, four on the
wall and two perched on wooden replica mid-century teak steamer deck chairs. The audio mix
experienced via the headphones is intense and personal —only in this private space does feldman-kiss feature the original sounds of the Sea-Watch rescue video mixed with ululation samples.
Crucially, it is only via the headphones that the rescue is confirmed with the simple words “Give me
your hand.”, a direct audio reproduction sourced from the original Sea-Watch footage.
As we look (and listen), the drama of what we experience forces us to consider our sense of self,
humanity and freedom. The poetics of the images recalls Lucille Clifton's moving short poem,'
blessing the boats', about facing life’s challenges, transformations and female survival. The poem's
last two lines read: “and may you in your innocence / sail through this to that”. Her words offer a deep
sense of wisdom and hope. Towards the end of Siren lll, feldman-kiss's on screen vision undergoes
a radical material shift from iceberg video footage into a stylised digital portal to escape and
resurfacing, creating a fluidity of movement and change. The highly crafted editing invokes ideas of
lucid dreaming –as image and sound collide, who is driving the narrative, the unseen protagonist, or
the chorus?
If Siren lll presents and reframes a narrative of trauma, in contrast, planet species animal human water
Agent. in motion on the move in flight of the Earth of the Land of the Ocean her ecology. here and there
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
sea and ice wind and current seed and settlement. (study for Siren lll)
is more playful. As an artist with a deep seated commitment to
collective practice, feldman-kiss worked in close collaboration
with Derya Akkaynak
3, a computer scientist specialising in
videographic colour calibration of oceanographic research data.
In feldman-kiss’s usual internet research focussed process they
found their co-creator for this two-channel video installation
online. Using the raw iceberg video data from which Siren lll was
cut, feldman-kiss and Akkaynak created an ever-evolving seabed
of dazzling marine colour and coral communities. Presented
on two curved LED screen nests mounted on simple maple ply
plinths, the kaleidoscopic video offers an intimate view into a
shifting seabed ripe with energy and possibility. Orange gallery
walls and loops of prominent orange electrical cords that power
the installation consciously echo the colour of the survival
jackets and equipment used by the Sea-Watch rescuers.
Siren lll's presentation on LED screens adjacent to the steamer
chairs and the digital tapestry forces a collision of interior and
exterior worlds, suggesting a complex relationship between the
public and the private. However, the prominent display of the
behind-the-scenes industrial electronics of Siren III, is in direct
contrast to the elegance and tenderness displayed by the finely
printed silk tapestry of Siren lV. The physical presence of the silk
separates the various artworks offering space for contemplation
and defusing the light emitted from the many video screens
throughout the gallery space. Materially, the digital textiles
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
provide a dreamlike quality coupled with a sense of beauty and
domesticity, which counterbalance the imposing electronics
of the screens. As images morph and change, an aquatic world
awakens and takes shape on the screens, and we ebb and flow
in sync with the penetrating soundscape and jewel-like images.
As we take stock of what we hear, we realise that the ululations
form an 'other' space in an ever-increasing call to consciousness.
feldman-kiss urges us not only to engage visually but also to
connect viscerally and spiritually with, to borrow words from
the title of one of the artist’s previous works, “the plight of
the sufferer”. The empathy the artist hopes to elicit from the
viewer is not one of pity but of rage at the enormity of senseless
human suffering and environmental loss unfolding locally and
globally. Linking experiences of human displacement between
present and past homelands is an essential element of the
show. SIREN references historical migration by land and sea
to create empathic pathways into the traumatic experiences
of the many hopeful and vulnerable people in flight toward
refuge. Unfortunately, despite reaching 'safety', many are not
welcomed. As Brendan Kennedy's 2017 Toronto Star exposé,
Caged in Canada4, revealed of Canada's shameful treatment
of African asylee Ebrahim Touré who suffered 69 months of
indefinite detention, mainly served at the Lindsay Ontario
maximum security prison, followed by years of immigration
limbo and continued harassment by the Canada Border Services
Agency.
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
feldman-kiss's ongoing research and site-specific explorations
directly challenge and disrupt dominant media narratives by
looking and thinking more deeply to discover the unseen and the
unknown. Forgoing any adherence to documentary or narrative
realism. feldman-kiss creates enigmatic spaces that deny the
viewer a comforting 'lesson in history', theirs is a critique and
meditation on the here and now. As the musicologist, writer
and filmmaker Trinh T.Minh-ha suggests, rather than speaking
for communities, feldman-kiss is 'speaking nearby'. feldman-kiss sets out to reframe and represent the Sea-Watch narrative
with an engaged political reading as a challenge to reductive
reactionary newspeak interpretations. The histories feldman-kiss prompts the audience to keep close to the surface are their
own contemporary lived experiences coupled with an expanded
sense of collective kinship that encompasses our planet, species,
families, cultures and nations –each informing the other.
The questions posed by the artworks regarding the seduction of
the Ocean, intertwined with more brutal and savage memories,
is an effort to remould colonial and diasporic histories, to
disrupt the tendency to sit back and consume the ‘tragedy of
others’ . Set against the vibrant background of multicultural
contemporary Toronto, SIREN acknowledges the stories of
thousands of unknowns. The SIREN chorus calls us to remember
and to witness as their urgent and compelling voices offer an
embodied sense of warning, healing and psychic repair. SIREN's
sonic register is essential to unlocking our sense of place. Visceral discomfort
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
and political uncertainty haunt the work, evoking possibility, and failure. The artworks' dynamic sound elements address us directly, but at times they also seem to fold back into and beyond the speakers to their own deeper inner world. With eyes on present-day war, transnational migration, and environmental collapse, feldman-kiss's urgent concern is for our species and planet and presents an expansive perspective on what is family, community and humanity
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
No rescue without you
Support Sea-Watch
Since 2015, Sea-Watch has been involved in
the rescue of over 40,000 people. We are doing
everything we can to save as many people as
possible from drowning. In 2021, Sea-Watch
rescued over 2000 people from distress at sea in
six challenging missions.
Thanks to your donations, we can continue our
mission at the world’s deadliest border and stand
up for safe and legal escape routes!
www.sea-watch.org
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ Bio
nichola feldman-kiss creates across disciplines with emphasis on relational, lens and hybrid media
technologies presented as social engagement, institution intervention and public installation.
feldman-kiss’s process-rich research proposes identity as a fugitive concept while focusing on
the body as a contested site of cultural production.
The artist’s 25 year oeuvre is an ongoing critique of the Colonial paradigm (the violent ingestion of
land, resources, peoples and cultures). Their artworks and installations lay bare the entanglements
of globalised order that insist rights onto some while withholding the same entitlements from
others, and ask us to reconsider difficult questions about what it means to be conscious social
bodies within the contemporary moment. nichola feldman-kiss art and technology innovations
and institution interventions have been hosted by the National Research Council of Canada,
the Ottawa Hospital Eye Institute, Canada's Department of National Defence, and the United
Nations among others.
nichola feldman-kiss holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She a is a first-generation
Canadian of the Caribbean diaspora and a repatriated citizen of Germany and Jamaica live
working between Toronto (Tkaronto) and rural Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk).
Karen Alexander \ Bio
Karen Alexander is a London-based independent film and moving image curator and researcher.
She has worked with and for the Royal College of Art and the British Film Institute and as a guest
curator for a wide range of UK-based cultural institutions and art galleries, including Iniva, the
Serpentine Gallery Up Projects, Tate, Autograph, London and the Watershed Bristol.
She has lectured and spoken widely about film, race and representation and contributed to
numerous publications. Her research areas are UK artists' film and video, feminist and post-colonial politics of representation and gender. In 2014 Karen founded Curating Conversations, a
practice-based professional development initiative aimed at emerging visual artists. She curated
Whip It Good: Spinning From History's Filthy Mind by Danish/Trinidadian artist Jeannette
Ehlers in 2015 and the Black Atlantic Cinema Club for Autograph ABP. In 2017 she co-founded
Philomela's Chorus, a moving image commissioning and exhibition platform for women of
colour, and in 2018 curated Dream Time: We All Have Stories for Nuit Blanche Toronto. As guest
curator for the Cinema Rediscovered Festival in Bristol, she curated A Passion for Remembering:
The Films of Maureen Blackwood in 2019 and Black Paris in 2021. Karen is on the board of
Longplayer and is currently a tutor at Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
What is a mermaid, really? I wonder. Is She the call that propels the seeker into the blue? Abandonment into flight? Is She the mirage of desperation? The voice of salinity? Desire itself on the way back to the womb?
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023
nichola feldman-kiss \ SIREN booklet at Koffler November 2022 - March 2023